RISING TIDES
Observations from the IMC Research Process

The Muse Moment

The launch of Meta’s Muse is widely considered a ChatGPT-like moment, where agentic AI has officially gone mainstream.

• The mainstream version of OpenClaw. Historically, autonomous AI agents (like open-source experiments OpenClaw or Instinct) required technical configuration and ran in developer environments. Meta bypassed this barrier by focusing purely on frictionless consumer accessibility. Powered by Meta’s Muse Spark model, every user gets an agent to autonomously browse the web, manage calendars, organize emails, make phone calls, and handle travel bookings. Within 2 weeks of its launch, Muse amassed 2.5M downloads, significantly pacing ahead of ChatGPT’s early adoption trajectory.
• A new workload hits datacenters. The shift is simple but potentially profound: AI is evolving from something you ask into something that does. If that model scales, persistent agents require more than GPU inference. They need servers to stay running, CPUs to orchestrate tasks, memory to maintain context, storage to remember, and networks to continuously interact with the internet. If agents become mainstream, millions of consumers could effectively be deploying their own virtual computers in the cloud, adding another leg to the AI infrastructure buildout.
• Where the tide reaches beyond $META. AMD ($AMD) and Intel ($INTC) address rising CPU intensity; Micron ($MU), SanDisk ($SNDK), Everpure ($P) and NetApp ($NTAP) benefit from increased memory and storage requirements; Cloudflare ($NET) and DigitalOcean ($DOCN) sits directly in the path of rising machine-generated internet traffic as agents search, communicate and transact across the web. Twilio ($TWLO) and F5 ($FFIV) enable agents to communicate and interact with APIs; Snowflake ($SNOW), Palantir ($PLTR), Datadog ($DDOG) and Dynatrace ($DT) provide the context and observability agents need to operate; while Palo Alto Networks ($PANW), CrowdStrike ($CRWD), Fortinet ($FTNT), Okta ($OKTA) and Rubrik ($RBRK) address the expanding security, identity and resilience requirements.